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Two Tools for Archiving Web Pages

I’ve found two decent tools for archiving pages from the Web. Page archival can be very useful in at least two cases:

1. You want to backup a page of your own content and you want to preserve it as is. Dan discussed the need for this in When Others Delete Your Past. While a personal backup is best, the following tools may come in handy when you don’t have access to a website’s backup system.
2. You want to capture a page that may change soon. For example, a public official says something controversial on her campaign site and takes the page down after complaints.

Diigo – Diigo is designed around Internet research and does many interesting things. One can save and tag pages, highlight text, annotate and send the page off to collaborators. The most interesting new thing Diigo does is save a “snapshot” of a page. What Diigo calls a screenshot though is a cached version of the page. This means the user can still search and highlight the text involved. I tested flash videos embedded in pages and found these preserved in the cached version of the page as well.

PositivePress by Iterasi – Positive Press may be priced high for those only interested in page archival, but it’s an impressive product worth mentioning. The archival tool is a one-button approach and also saves pages as a searchable, cached copy of the original.